"Everybody's got a story to tell. Six words is all you need."
Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a complete novel in only six words. He wrote: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
Recently, Larry smith of smithmag.net challenged readers to come up with their own six word life story. Nearly 15,000 people had a story to tell. The best entries created the NY Times best-selling book: Not Quite What I Was Planning.
Here's some of the best entries that I saw:
"Reinventing myself again, and again, and..."
"Bet you think it's about you."
"It all changed in an instant."
"Write about sex learn about love."
"After Harvard, had baby with crackhead."
This got me thinking, how exactly could I sum up my life story? It seems so simple, until you have to actually take an introspective look at your life up to now and who you are. It can prove very cathartic. Frankly, I think I would have trouble writing a complete memoir in six hundred words, let alone six. What's even more paradoxical is that my life story might be completely different today than it is a year from now.
In any case, Here's the nugget I came Up with:
Objective: failure is not an option.
